The School of Sustainability is being established with $1.1 billion donated to Stanford University by billionaire investor John Doerr and his wife Ann Doerr. The school, called “Doerr School of Sustainability”, will work in the fields of climate change and sustainability and will focus on producing scientific solutions. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement on the subject that the new school will make policy on climate change and focus on what needs to be done to make the world better.
Different departments within Stanford (Precourt Institute of Energy, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Stanford Woods Environmental Institute, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hopkins Marine Station Facilities) will also gather together in the faculty, which will contain a unique set of disciplines that do not normally come together in a single academic unit. will be brought.
SUSTAINABILITY RACE BETWEEN BILLIONARDS
This support of John Doerr, who is among the investors of technology giants such as Amazon, Google and Slack, and who is currently the chairman of the venture capital company Kleiner Perkins, and Ann Doerr, who is on the board of directors of Khan Academy, was the largest donation in the history of the school.
At the same time, the Doerr couple became one of the few billionaires to invest in climate change with this donation. In 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that he would donate $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund. Also in 2020, Tesla founder Elon Musk stated that he would transfer $100 million to carbon reduction technologies. Bill and Melinda Gates recently transferred $315 million to agricultural research and climate threats last November.
